nutrition (the real kind)

Temptation.

athleticadventures — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:50:19 +0000

Last weekend, I was certain I’d worked up enough will power to work out daily. Twice daily, in fact, was my regimen until I went back to work on Tuesday. That day, I couldn’t work out in the morning (too tired). And I couldn’t work out before bed (still too tired). So I decided to try extra hard to watch what I ate this week, to make up for not working out as planned.

And that went well. At first.

I managed to dodge the Thin Mints my brother brought home, and to steer clear of the soda, left over from some party we had a few months ago (but skipping soda is never a problem, considering the fact I don’t drink it.). I ate lots of greens, avoided carbs and apparently, all this wasn’t enough since last night, I ran (and by ran, I mean drove) to Starbucks where I had a grande vanilla steamer and a piece of pumpkin loaf.

I’M A FAILURE!

I’m pretty sure that was among my first thoughts this morning, somewhere between the “I am way too freaking’ tired not to hit the snooze” and the “Thank God that was a dream.” (Did you know I really can’t stand remembering my dreams? I can never tell they were dreams right away. It’s kind of horrifying.).

I know now that I’m not a failure. But today’s a new day, to try to do better.

h2o

athleticadventures — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:48:42 +0000

I love water. I like swimming in it. Kayaking upon it. Being near it.

But my relationship with it’s been on the rocks lately, due mostly to the fact that I don’t drink enough of it. For the most part - other than your occasional tea, fresh juice or milk (and my rare glass of framboise!) – it’s all I drink. But drinking’s not really a habit for me. I drink a glass in the morning, a glass at night and a few in between if I get thirsty. And I don’t drink with meals unless I’m at a restaurant.

So I decided today to make it a point to drink a lot more of it. I started by drinking a couple of pints at work, and I may up it to three tomorrow.

It’s only been twelve hours since the start of this experiment, so no major results yet. But this is something I’ll be exploring in my life and on this blog for the next few weeks.

More to come!

You CAN live without it.

athleticadventures — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:17:57 +0000

I sank into the cushions of a well-worn couch, and sipped my bottled water. I wanted to burrow into my book, but the cafe – sometimes a refuge for readers – roared with blenders and laughter and small talk. So I watched the barista make a caramel-this for one guy, and a mocha-that for an older woman. I listened to her ask for extra chocolate, and I had to laugh when she surrounded her request with sighs of nutritional guilt.
“I wish chocolate were a health food,” she said.
“It can be,” one of her coffee cohorts countered. “They even make diet candy now.”
Diet is a term sometimes used in place of “sugar-free,” and if that’s to what that man referred, I truly hope he reads this. He, and countless others who equate sugar-free with healthy, probably stock their kitchens with sugar-free cookies, sugar-free cake, diet candy and Diet Coke in hopes to enjoy what they love while losing weight, or despite diabetes and other diseases.
One to hit store shelves in America last fall, Diet Coke Plus, might seem pretty pleasing. But I brought the soda up during a conversation with a self-taught nutritionist named Sherman, who works at Abby’s Health and Nutrition on North Dale Mabry in Tampa. He’s done a big share of independent study on nutrition.
“I think it’s a ploy,” Sherman said. “They’re using (vitamins) as a gimmick.”
But Diet Coke seems to take the stuff seriously. According to its Web site, “Diet Coke Plus is everything you love about Diet Coke, plus several essential nutrients.” I checked the soda’s list of ingredients, and I must say I was pretty impressed.
So I pulled out my borrowed copy of “Prescription for Nutritional Healing,” which is an 800-something page monstrous collection of drug-free remedies, to dissect the difference between the vitamins Diet Coke added.
There’s vitamin B3, which can benefit circulation, skin and metabolism. There’s vitamin B6, which can boost cancer immunity and help make PMS bearable. And there’s vitamin B12, which can keep cardiovascular systems running and can prevent anemia. But then, there’s aspartame.
“I can’t think of one positive thing about sugar,” Sherman said to me. “As bad as sugar is, artificial sweeteners are worse.”
And aspartame is one of those artificial sweeteners. It first appeared in some soda pop and packets back in 1983, instead of sugar. The chemical is made up of amino acids, phenylalanine, aspartic acid and methyl ester. Methyl ester, during digestion, turns to methanol. And methanol, to formaldehyde (which is part of what’s used to embalm bodies. Dead ones.).
A researcher discovered it accidentally in 1965. What we know as Nutrasweet, Equal and the chemical used to sweeten most diet sodas started out as a substance used in the creation of a drug for ulcers. While the researcher researched, he got the powder on his hands. Later, he licked his finger before grabbing a sheet of paper. And for him, how sweet it was.
But countless others say not so much.
There are DVDs and books, Web sites and support groups for people who call themselves victims of aspartame. There’s a list of 92 symptoms attributed to aspartame and found in complaints about it to the FDA, from headaches to gran mal seizures. And there’s research behind it.
According to research conducted by Dr. Woodrow C. Monte with the University of Arizona, methanol in aspartame is poison, despite what supporters of the substance say. Many of them, including the creators of aspartame.org, say humans get as much (if not more) methanol from fruits and veggies anyway. But according to psychiatrist Ralph Walton during his appearance on one of those DVDs, called Sweet Misery, the methanol in fruit is different from the methanol in aspartame. Walton, some of whose patients suffered from side effects associated with aspartame, used the chance to research what the stuff is made of. “In nature,” he said, the methanol in fruits and vegetables is bound to pectin. To separate the methanol from the pectin requires the presence of a specific enzyme. And according to Walton, it’s an enzyme humans don’t have.
His point, in other words, is that methanol made in nature, bound in pectin and found in fruit passes through us without collecting in us. The body also has ethanol on its side while we eat fruits or vegetables since when there’s naturally occurring methanol in something, there’s also ethanol and enough of it to negate the effects of the toxin.
The argument, like many, will probably never end. The FDA may always back its decision to approve aspartame, and people may always blame that for their diseases. I may never be able to prove that aspartame causes those diseases, and that’s probably because I will never use it.
So here’s a thought: if you aren’t supposed to have sugar, maybe you just shouldn’t have sugar. To replace it with a sweet, toxic substance just so you can still drink soda is silly. There is nothing we need from soda in order to survive. That’s why I’ll never understand why so few seem interested in trying to survive without it.

thoughts over a bowl of organic cream of broccoli soup

athleticadventures — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:56:36 +0000

“Fasting and natural diet, though essentially unknown [in today's U.S.] as a therapy, should be the first treatment when someone discovers that she or he has a medical problem. It should not be applied only to the most advanced cases, as is present practice. Whether the patient has a cardiac condition, hypertension, autoimmune disease, fibroids, or asthma, he or she must be informed that fasting and natural, plant-based diets are a viable alternative to conventional therapy, and an effective one. The time may come when not offering this substantially more effective nutritional approach will be considered malpractice.” – Joel Fuhrman, M.D., Fasting and Eating for Health

I need to get my hands on a copy of that book.

What he says is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. While I ranted to a friend recently, I remember saying that I’m starting to believe the greatest cause of disease in America is living like an American. Here, we begin by bombarding our bodies with “food” that lacks nutrition. We begin by neglecting ourselves. We’re living in a society that says it’s o.k. to be too busy to sleep, to rely on caffeine to keep us awake and to choose convenience over nutrition. We like things that taste sweet, but when we need to or want to stop eating sugar, we replace it with chemicals. And when it all starts catching up with us, we take drugs our doctors give us and trust they’ll take care of the problem.

But here’s a thought: how many of us have actually tried to heal our bodies naturally? “But my doctor says that won’t work.”

Of course your doctor says it won’t work. If it works (and I believe it does), you’re not going to need them anymore. And doctors don’t want that.

There are exceptions, of course, like Joel Fuhrman. Can’t wait to read that book!

the way you make me feel…

athleticadventures — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:54:39 +0000

So I’m sitting around, waiting for a call and feeling, simply put, pretty crappily. A little down, a lotta anxious. Tired, lethargic, moody. What the hay, man, what the hay?! I thought to myself.

And then, it hit me. Last night, I went to a bachelorette party and ate and drank crap that included the following:

pizza.
sherbet.
soda.
ice cream.
pie.
chocolate covered dried fruit. (Stop making excuses for it. Just because it’s fruit doesn’t make it healthy.)

So far today, I’ve eaten the following:

two slices of turkey bacon (do as I say. not as I do.)
some scrambled eggs
Nut Thins
organic pepper jack cheese
a piece of pork

Could be better, could be worse. I’m going to pay close attention to how I feel tomorrow.

Wanna know what I think “the hay” is?

I think it’s last night’s food.

food & mood

athleticadventures — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:54:52 +0000

A foot felt like a mile, a day felt like a year. I felt heavy and hollow, always anxious or depressed. So I’d down my chocolate and my chips, and other feel good foods, and I’d chase them with chai lattes or fruit juices only fit for the kind of kids who can handle that much sugar. And even when what I ate or drank didn’t set off some kind of sugar induced coma, I’d usually regress to where I’d begun anyway: lethargic, at best.
It took six straight months of depression and anxiety before I stopped blaming a “breakup” and haywire hormones for my wellbeing’s erosion. First, I started living my life again. And when I wanted to feel better, I started to experiment with food. When I did, I finally figured it out. After all the sugar and caffeine, too many carbs and too much dairy, I knew. What I was eating was eating away at me.
It’s all in your head, they’d say.
Friends and strangers didn’t get it, nor did they get me. And when they’d tempt me with their cookies and brownies, I’d shrug (and rarely, I’d give in). But when they’d brush off my attempts at taking back health by embracing nutrition, I’d dare them to eat organic for a week. So far, nobody’s taken me up on that. But when someone does, I’ll dare them to tell me they don’t feel differently afterward.
“It is a great challenge to admit the far reaching effects of our eating habits,” said Peggy McGrath, a raw foodist who’s working on a raw food cook book, and on a book about the connection between mood and food. “To challenge the way someone eats and what they are eating is often challenging their fundamental views of life.”
McGrath spent the first 20 years of her life eating like a typical American. She learned from her parents, friends and the media to match her food to the occasion, or to alter her moods with the foods that she’d eat.
“If you want to have fun, have pizza; if you want to celebrate, you eat cake,” she said. “If you’re depressed, go have your favorite food. No matter what the mood, I was taught there was a food to match it.”
If she needed energy, she’d choose caffeine; for stress relief, she’d turn to carbs and for pleasure, she’d indulge in desserts. She and I both grew up like that, with food that was fast, and canned and frozen.
“At 20 years old, I noticed fatigue, headaches, stomach pain, bloating, constipation, shallow breathing, decreased energy, depression,” she said.
The same sort of epiphany that hit me hit her hard, too, and years later, she is where I hope to be someday. It’s “taken 10 years of deprogramming,” she said; ten years, that is, to cultivate the kind of honesty and awareness necessary to take a look at her diet and make legitimately nutritious decisions.
But when I look around, I see why McGrath is the minority. In the stores where we shop, boxes and cans are stacked on shelves, wrapped in attractive packages that scream fat free, sugar free, low carb, no carb and that boast quick cook times. And it sells whether it’s laced with artificial sweeteners that turn to formaldehyde in our bodies. It sells whether it’s processed, unnatural, pumped with preservatives, nuked ’til its nutrients die, fried ’til it feels like it’s fake. It sells regardless of whether no one knows what it’s made of, regardless of whether no one you know can pronounce its ingredients. It sells because it’s there. And it’s easy. Plus, it’s a little conspiracyish.
“Our society is duped into believing the food that’s largely offered is good, and that they’re getting nutrients from it,” McGrath said. “There are millions of dollars spent on marketing processed food to us and it is marketed as convenient.”
And convenience is what we want, right? After all, many of us are too depressed, anxious, tired or stressed to spend more than a few minutes preparing our meals.
We are busy, we are hungry and we don’t have the energy to change our eating habits. I believe we lack the energy because we’re malnourished when we eat what’s convenient. And something tells me the ones who disagree can only disagree because they’ve been desensitized.
“Our bodies are amazingly adaptable to pain,” McGrath said. “There are so many levels of discomfort I didn’t even realize I was living with until I started eating real food and they disappeared.”
And that’s not unlike what I experienced after my food experiment more than a year ago. I ate organic for one week, and one evening toward the end of that week, I couldn’t figure out why I seemed so hyper. I haven’t had caffeine, I thought to myself. And I don’t think I had too much sugar.
A minute later, I came to a conclusion. Was I hyper? No. I had energy, and I’d forgotten what that felt like. When that week ended, most of my anxiety ended with it. And I’ve been different in a good way ever since.
Still skeptical? Well then try it.
I dare you.

Let food be thy medicine…

athleticadventures — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:59:56 +0000

Quotes from a quoteboard outside the Green Bean :

“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.” – Hippocrates

and

“Those who think they have no time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.” – Edward Stanley

High fives to those guys. Seriously. Where are the Hippocrates-es and Edward Stanleys of today?!